I never knew Newgrounds was so cut throat. I remember thinking about joining that site when I was younger.
They are one of the most toxic communities on the net.
1) The way they judge you is pitiful. Their first impressions of you is based on your sign up date and post count. If you sign up between 1999 to 2004, you are considered old school and have full credibility. If you signed up 2006 and after, you are literally seen as a noob who is ruining the site. 2005 was neutral ground. They also think the higher your post count is, the more credibly you have since on Newgrounds the mods aggressively encourage you to make quality posts instead of short spammy ones.
2) The way they interact with you is atrocious. Having a proper discussion with them is impossible unless you post in the Politics forum. They always resort to petty name calling and think the most effective way to win an argument is to point out all the spelling mistakes in your post. They are incredibly abusive and the mods let them abuse you for the most part. If I could diagnose the entire community with a mental disorder, I would diagnose them with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. They are incredibly arrogant, entitled, lack empathy and will exploit you for their own amusement.
3) Their culture revolves around hating everything made after 1999. They are notoriously hard to please and would crap all over me for making my comics like how you see them here on CF. They are incredibly negative, pessimistic, and have nothing good to say about anyone. They are also obsessed with the male genitalia and act like middle school students. It's mostly made up of angry teenage boys and you'll be hard pressed to find girls there because girls get
A LOT of unwanted attention there. If I was female, I'd be incredibly uncomfortable being there. NG used to be an underground website where people posted their violent flashes so it attracted all sorts of creeps and freaks. There was one user who actually committed a school shooting after making violent flashes. Another one attempted to burn his school down after making a topic about it and was eventually caught before he could carry it out. He was put into a mental institution.
4) The moderators are very unprofessional. They honestly believe that they're better than you (some even openly admit it) and they often lock your topic with a very snide post. They have no problem humiliating you, breaking the very rules they enforce, and having their very own clique. If you make a humorous topic that doesn't reach their standards, they will delete it and ban everyone who posted in it. There are actually rules on their forum that some mods will enforce but others won't. I served as a moderator who specialized in making flash icons and sorting flash games and movies in genres for an upcoming redesign and had access to their secret mod forum. The admins said that the mods had to stop acting like modship was a reward for being such 'great users'. They even said that they refuse to admit that they're wrong because it would, 'stroke the user's egos'. More like it would damage their own by acknowledging that they screwed up.
5) Trolling there is an every day thing. When it comes to feeding trolls, they will give you a steak and lobster dinner along with the finest wines. People frequently make sock puppet accounts just to post incredibly outrageous topics and personas so everyone will flame them.
6) Drama is common whenever a notorious flash game or movie gets removed. If you side with the admins and mods, you were considered a suck up. If you sided against them, you were considered a troll. There was no winning with them. Usually the drama was far more brutal than what you typically see here on CF.
7) There have been incidents where accounts have been hacked and phished. One moderator got phished leaving his financial information vulnerable. He even said that it was incredible that people who had the potential to financially ruin him only hacked his account just so they can troll him on NG. Another moderator hot phished and his account was used to vandalize the front page of the website.
8) There are certain features you'll find on other forums that you won't see on NG because the admins KNOW that the users will abuse them. For the longest time an edit button was a nono for them because people would edit their posts just to troll others. They added one but it has a 15 minute time limit and they can look back to what you originally posted previously. They don't have a 'like' system because users would make sock puppet accounts to like their own posts. There were some features from other parts of the site that had to be removed because people kept abusing them to troll.
These are what I can name at the top of my head. I don't know why I spent so much time with them in the first place. At first I enjoyed their dark and cynical sense of humour but after a while the whole angsty Columbine teenager mentality gets incredibly old.
